Wednesday, October 20, 2010

"The "Cultural Revolution" had nothing revolutionary about it except the name, and nothing cultural about it except the initial tactical pretext. It was a power struggle waged at the top between a handful of men and behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement."

Herr Sarrazin objects precisely to Arabs and Turks' retention of petit bourgeois modes of living, and their failure to enthusiastically take up positions as shelf stackers at the Aldi. Together with Chancellor Merkel's lamentations about these same workers' lack of reverence for Pombär, these comments wonderfully illustrate the decomposition of rational thought among the German élite.

Neoliberalism is an ideology that does not realise its worldview. The Roman Empire, or the Islamic Caliphate, attempted to impose a system their leaders approved. Even the Soviet Union imposed an economic system - the bureaucratic command economy - that its leadership understood and approved. Neoliberalism is a sort of pastoral fantasy, created by Western capitalism's own bureaucracy, in place of the scientific analysis that they are incapable of producing.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Zizek's latest thing might be thought of as a sort of Pepsi challenge, where Guardian readers get to decide if they like the cool flavours of Robert Brasillach - if reading a newspaper is tasting blind.

Monday, October 04, 2010

A good method for analysing things is, start with what is really happening.

Some British workers get that the point of immigration is to keep wages low. Those that are both self interested and economically literate tend to be opposed to immigration for this reason. The media and government apparatus responds to this constituency by shrilly accusing them of racism, and offering them various ways of expressing this purely economic grievance, involving shrill expressions of racism, in various strengths, and no programme for improving their economic circumstances. The notion that British workers are seeking to preserve a pure British race, or a pristine British culture, is part of this process of recuperation, by which the plutocracy seek to defame or divert people critical of its policies. But this imposture is absurd, because Britain has been racially diverse for a long time, and its culture is capitalism.

Dr Zizek’s shoddiest op-ed yet basically rehashes the British plutocracy’s propaganda, in an attempt to convince Guardian reading “progressives” that the working class are “a paranoid multitude”, subject to violent racist fantasies, with the inference that the “progressive” middle class ought to rally round the oriflamme of plutocratic “liberalism”.

I realise this simple explanation doesn’t account for all of Zizek’s rhetoric: his nonsensical history, his neglected fascist “thinkers”, his collages of disparate ideas dressed up as an argument, and his media personality, apparently delighted to talk about “half-Jews” “and so on“. I’m not sure that Zizek “ironically” represents the true spirit of European plutocracy, while posing as its adversary, or anything like that. Really, I think he’s just a bit of a cock.